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AOL Hometown Images & Files Still Available

By Joe on December 6, 2008

After AOL shut down their free Web hosting, a lot of users’ memories were shattered. In light of this, a determined Webmaster and computer engineer, Joe O’Brien, discovered that AOL users can still access their Hometown uploads. I reached out and offered him a chance to write to you on my blog in this guest posting.

Any user who used either members.aol.com or hometown.aol.com can still access their files. This does not apply to Journal users.

As of Dec 4th 2008, many (if not most) images and files are still available to download and save.

When I left AOL about 6 years ago, I saved all my files and images via FTP, totaling about 60 HTML pages and almost 400 images.  Being a webmaster, I always used FTP versus AOL’s My Place [old-school FTP client] which was slow and inadequate. Though no longer with AOL, all of those files remained on AOL’s server all this time, but with limited privileges of download only.

Though viewing and “My Place” access disappeared on Oct 31st following AOL’s Hometown Closing announcement, files and images are still available with the same FTP setup I had created 10 years ago.

I’ve made a page showing detailed info for the FTP access and download. If you don’t have FTP, I give easy instructions on how to install and set it up.  So far, it’s worked for many users from different countries.  Either click on the “Saving My AOL Files” logo above, or just visit the link below.

http://www.taimantis.com/get-my-aol-files.html

As of today, files are still available.  Better get them while they last.

Good luck.
Joe

Thanks, Joe for the helpful information and finding a solution for avid users of AOL Hometown! Looking at your instructions, it appears AOL only made a DNS change. The servers will probably be decommissioned during Q1 2009 — just a guess.

I scanned the subnet for servers that users can access  to save their Hometown contents. I cleaned up and filtered my results on this spreadsheet. Enjoy!

Posted in | Tagged , , ,

  • That spreadsheet is pure awesome. I'm totally bookmarking that. Will you keep updating it now and then through Q1? I'll add a link to it to my post on the topic. Thanks for this!
  • Joe
    @Marah Marie

    I updated the spreadsheet with feedback from Mr. O'Brien. AOL's already made a move in decommissioning a set of FTP servers.

    ~J
  • Figures. Thanks for the update. :)
  • Joe O
    @Marah Marie

    Joe and Marie, thanks to both of you for spreading the word. Starting to get more visits from different countries now. I link back to each of your sites on the page now. :)

    Joe
  • Well I think time finally ran out. AOL removed all files from the servers, even the backup servers. Port 21 is still open for anonymous FTP login, but all files are gone (erased). I noticed this yesterday and have made an entry to my site regarding it. I'll leave my page available in case something changes, but I doubt it.

    With server space so available and plentiful these days, they could have easily left one server available to help people. I just hope enough people could save their files.

    Day before yesterday there were 25 servers, mirror images, containing all our files. Today there are none.

    Typical AOL, just in time for Christmas.

    Joe O
  • claudia
    good morning Is there an easier ( for not too computer savvy PC users to try and get their AOLHometown pages back? I downloaded the Free FTP Commander , yet it was very confusing( for me) and I did take all the steps which you recommended. Thank you very kindly in advance for any further help.
  • Lewis G. Schmidt
  • Simon Wagstaff
    People like Lewis G. Schmidt may be able to recover their pages at the Internet Archive.

    http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

    I checked on the first of Mr. Schmidt's files and it is there.
  • Mr. K
    All of you who are complaining had time to get your files from aol i knew about aol closing hometown and i was not even a member of aol, and if you people were so worried about pictures etc you would not keep them on any internet site you would keep them at your house on a disk. Aol announced the closing of hometown way before your files got deleted so that tells me that you must have not been to interested in your own site or you would have seen the warnings from them about closing hometown...
  • j harnon
    I had saved a link from aol hometown user that someone sent me for research. The link was the descendants of francis billingsley. I am not an aol user, do not have an account, is there some way to access the spreadsheet? I do not remember the person's name that posted the spread sheet.
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